AI for Nonprofits Cohort
Building an AI workflow your organization will actually use.
Even the orgs that have already “done” AI training.
Why this cohort?
Because most AI for nonprofits training teaches you about AI, but it doesn’t leave you with anything.
It’s not your fault. You’ve probably sat through a webinar, nodded along, felt briefly inspired, and gone right back to doing things the way you did before. There’s no shortage of free AI courses aimed at nonprofits. What there’s a shortage of is time — and a six-month course, or a self-paced video library you’ll never finish, is not a plan.
So AI use at your org stays reactive and individual. One person has a ChatGPT trick. Someone else has a prompt saved in a doc nobody else can find. Every task starts from scratch, every time. Nothing is written down — not the workflows, and not the rules. Nobody has decided what staff are actually allowed to put into these tools, which means the question isn’t whether someone pastes donor data into a chatbot. It’s when. And when the one person who “does the AI stuff” leaves, their knowledge walks out the door with them.
Using AI is not the same as having a workflow. And using AI without a policy isn’t a strategy — it’s exposure. This Cohort closes both gaps.
What You’ll Walk Away With
Not just notes. Not just inspiration. Four things you can actually put to use:
- A working AI assistant — instructions saved once, reused forever, built around a real recurring task your org actually does. This is the difference between a one-off prompt and a workflow. Tested on live work before the Cohort ends.
- A one-page AI use policy, drafted and ready to bring to your ED. (Already have a policy? We’ll red-team the one you’ve got.)
- Prompting practice you can apply to any tool, any task, after we’re gone.
- A 30-day check-in, because we measure success by whether you’re still using what you built a month later — not by whether you liked the slides.
Session 1 / Ground, Prompt, Build
- A grounding recap, and an honest conversation about the fears — job displacement, donor data, and the hype you’re right to be skeptical of
- Guided first practice, so nobody gets left behind
- Prompting fundamentals in breakout rooms — taught on your real task, not a toy example
- Lock in the one workflow your org will build, and draft its core instructions
- Feedback from facilitators and from peers working on similar problems
Session 2 / Refine, Govern, Sustain
- Troubleshooting clinic — bring what broke, we’ll debug it live
- Refine your assistant until it’s something you’d actually reuse
- AI policy workshop — walk out with a one-page policy your ED will accept
- The honest limits: where AI helps your work, and where it’s hype dressed up as strategy
- Commit to the workflow you’re keeping, and opt into your 30-day check-in
Cohort students will also receive:
- Two seats per organization. Bring a colleague — workflows only one person knows tend to die.
- Function-based breakout groups, so you’re learning alongside orgs whose problems look like yours.
- Access to recorded sessions and take-home assignments, to build long-term team capacity.
- A community of nonprofit professionals figuring this out at the same time you are.
- Year long access to WWU
Pricing
Why Whole Whale for AI Capacity
We’re not a general-purpose training company that added an AI course this year. We’ve been working with nonprofits to build AI capacity for years
- CauseWriter.ai — we built an AI writing platform for the nonprofit sector, because nonprofits needed a tool that understood their voice.
- AI Capacity Building is a standing service line, not a side project. We help orgs write AI policy, train teams, and put guardrails up before something goes wrong — and we’ve walked organizations through actual AI implementation, not just strategy decks.
- We publish our own research on where the sector actually stands — including our analysis of nonprofit AI policies.
- We have our own AI Policy, published publicly. We’re not asking you to do anything we haven’t done ourselves.
Kathleen Costa-Daniels
Senior Manager, Strategy & AI Enablement
Kathleen leads AI enablement at Whole Whale, where she’s guided nonprofit and social impact organizations through the actual implementation of AI tools, not just the conversation about them. Her favorite work is helping organizations turn AI strategy into something that runs. She also serves as Provost of Whole Whale University, so she’s spent years figuring out how nonprofit professionals actually learn this stuff. She began her career on federal and state campaigns and holds a Master’s in Public Administration and Policy from American University — which is to say she knows what a policy needs to survive contact with a board.
Axel Kaban
Director, Analytics + Technology
Axel leads Whole Whale’s Technology, Analytics, and Optimization team and sits on our senior leadership team. He built the first version of Whole Whale University, and he’s one of the people behind CauseWriter.ai — Whole Whale’s own AI product for nonprofits. He’s been building AI tools for this sector, not just talking about them. He’s also the person who will debug your assistant when it breaks.
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